FROM THE ARCHIVES:Erica Jong's sexually explicit feminist book Fear of Flying was among the novels of the week reviewed by Roy Foster this week in 1974. – JOE JOYCE
BETTER TO admit it at once and have done with it: I read Erica Jong’s over-acclaimed, over-reviewed “Fear of Flying” from cover to cover for the sole reason that there was some sort of sex in about every second page. And for all the women’s liberationalist [sic] dressing-or, undressing – I feel sure that this was no more than Miss Jong intended.
It’s a frankly awful book with an awful heroine and an awful story; but I can only admit that it was both more readable and more engrossing than anything else I came across in this week’s novels. For reasons that are, I’m sure, as sexist as they are sexual.
What then, is Erica Jong’s intention? It is, I’m sure, concealed somewhere in her message. The message is that the heroine – thirtyish, zany, attractive, frank, intelligent, and (no prizes for this one) New York Jewish – is possessed by the obsession that she must encounter the kind of copulation that she ecstatically refers to as “zipless.” All barriers dissolve, no names are needed. Her soul and body simply dissolve and melt into one with, say, the soldier across the railway carriage, and she then finds a sexual relationship in which her defensive, put-upon ego won’t be dominated or, in its turn, attempt to manipulate. This is all very well, it’s funnily put across and it must be a fantasy shared by practically everyone. And that’s the trouble.
Miss Jong produces the idea of her Isadora’s in the first chapter, and regurgitates it throughout her repetitive book. But there’s nothing that’s new enough in the idea to hang a novel upon, and as she flashes back to the past and her unsuccessful loves and marriages, and forward to her unsatisfying infidelity with an English psychoanalyst, the chimera of ziplessness just becomes a trite bore. So, in her way, does Isadora Wing.
But she can be very funny about sex. Miss Jong puts down jargon conversation with a neat touch – and not only that of the psychoanalysts among whom the desperate Isadora spends so much of her time. (For instance, wrestling frantically with the unwelcome advances of her brother-in-law and attempting to call him to his senses. Isadora reminds him of the forbidden degrees and “Lolita”: “I can’t stand his phony prose-style,” he snaps back.) And Miss Jon tackles the sexual encounters of Isadora Wing with a hungry crudity which is out of the ordinary, and possibly something new. It makes for a book that is easy to read.
But I think that Erica Jong intends a great deal more to be extracted from “Fear of Flying.” There’s some hard-hitting pathos, an awful lot of high-school psychoanalysis, a good dash of what someone (not me) might call “intellectual honesty,” and symbolism to beat the band. Isadora Wing, for God’s sake. And her pet obsession is, as you may have inferred, fear of flying. And we all now what dreaming of flying means.